Sansone’s alternative energy bet is paying off

Over the past five years, Anthony “Tony” Sansone Jr. has been quietly building Sangita, a private equity and real estate holdings firm in Clayton, investing more than $10 million in commercial real estate assets and services.

Now one of Sangita’s recent investments, an alternative energy solutions startup called Smart Energy Group in Florham Park, N.J., is paying off. The company posted first-year revenue of more than $10 million by catering to the $3 billion solar market.

Smart Energy, which is co-managed by Andrew Hamilton and Ian Diamond, provides renewable energy solutions to retail and industrial real estate projects in the Northeast. It installs solar panels as well as offers engineering analysis and economic forecasting for alternative energy projects. The company employs 12 people.

The idea to invest in renewable energy came from Sansone Jr.’s son, Tony Sansone III, who has served as Smart Energy’s chief operating officer since the company launched 18 months ago. Sansone III is also managing director at Sangita. Terms of Sangita’s private equity investment were not disclosed, although the firm does hold a majority ownership stake in Smart Energy.

Sansone Jr., a shareholder in his family’s commercial real estate firm, The Sansone Group, is chairman of Sangita.

Sansone III said property owners were looking to utilize alternative energy solutions in an effort to trim expenses. That demand, fueled by deregulated energy markets in states such as New Jersey, led to the Smart Energy investment.

“I was aware of the potential for solar with value-added investors,” he said. “There was also a relative void of institutional-caliber players” in New Jersey when it came to offering alternative energy solutions to construction projects in the $10 million to $30 million price range.

“There was an opportunity to enter the market and be that player,” Sansone III said.

Jared Blanton, spokesman for Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), a nonprofit trade group in Washington, D.C., said the solar market had been steadily growing and that growth was expected to continue. “There’s no better time to get into solar,” he said. The solar market has been growing consistently over the last five years, and industry revenue last year grew 36 percent despite the recession, according to SEIA.

While Smart Energy focuses on solar, Sansone III said it is looking to expand its suite of utility cost-reduction services with other alternative energy sources.

Sansone III said Smart Energy currently is working with a developer on a solar retrofit of a 155,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania. He said the company also is pursuing other projects in states where utilities have been deregulated.

Sansone Jr. said Sangita’s stake in Smart Energy was a sound investment, given the growth of the renewable-energy market. He declined to disclose projected sales growth for Smart Energy. Last year, the U.S. solar electric capacity from photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies grew to more than 2,000 megawatts, enough electricity to power more than 350,000 homes, according to the SEIA.

Meanwhile, to help manage the growth of its investment portfolio, Sangita hired Matt Bukhshtaber as director of investments. Prior to joining Sangita, Bukhshtaber closed $5 billion in real estate deals in the capital markets group at Cushman & Wakefield in Boston.

Sangita also hired Angelo Quatrano as its director of finance. Quatrano previously was a senior financial analyst at Stonebridge Associates in Boston. Both Bukhshtaber and Quatrano will be located in St. Louis.